HOW TO EAT A BOOK

Three voracious book lovers demonstrate different ways of reading—with active help from their predatory reading matter.

Not being the sorts of books that sit passively in the hands, the volumes that Sheila and her twin cousins, Gerald and Geraldine, pick up abruptly suck the three down into immersive whirls of experience: Sheila blasting off into space, timorous Gerald creeping his way to an encounter with a monstrous Bug-a-Boo, and irascible Geraldine (who is “terrific at being terrible”) ripping through pages to bare her teeth at a stunned T. Rex. The narrative is given to both lyrical and typographical flights of fancy (“Spiraling into / a world / of words, Hungry for answers, / Sheila asked / a beautiful question”), while the illustrations are images of three-dimensional pages on which paper cutouts of the three light-skinned children and other figures float over, sometimes through, exhilarating assemblages of multilayered cutouts, artfully elevated portions of scenes, and low shadows all lit with pops of color. Tables turn partway through as the books suddenly realize that far from digesting their readers, they themselves are being consumed, word by word. But even after all their words are gone, the books have left their marks on the trio of young readers. As the authors put it, “strange but true, / the way to eat a book, / is to let / THE BOOK EAT YOU!” Excellent advice.

Takes “battle of the books” to a whole new level.